lunches

Get a healthy start on your week by creating lunches that won’t derail your best eating intentions. These 31 recipes will keep you on track!

Happy New Year, friends!

Now that we’ve eaten too many cookies, drunk too much champagne, and thrown caution to the wind with our diets (because #holidays), 2018 is upon us and The Ghost of Christmas Future has awarded us a fresh slate. But that doesn’t mean we have to trade in our culinary vices for full force diet deprivation ala Sugar-Free-Paleo-Whole30-latest-diet-trend-to-jump-onto. Though if you are, more power to you.

For me, January is never about diet repentance or deprivation, but always about finding balance. It’s about enjoying comfort food like chicken pot pie or lasagna while also embracing more salads that don’t always require “detox” in the name.

Lunch is a good place to start, because it’s all too often the “chopped liver” of our three daily meals, and sometimes we skip it or eat a protein bar and call it good. Breakfast may get credited as the most important meal of the day, but lunch is a close runner-up and is the fuel needed to power through the day so we don’t succumb to the dreaded afternoon slump where we just want to face plant into our desks.

That’s why 2018’s first 31 day what to cook series installment is dedicated to healthy lunches, with an emphasis on meal prep.

And so here are 31 virtuous (but still totally yummy) lunch recipes to motivate you through the new-you month of January.